Search This Blog

METAL HISTORY / OPINION: Chuck Schuldiner and the Perennial Quest, 23 June 2017

“Won't you join me on the perennial questReaching into the dark, retrieving lightSearch for answers on the perennial questWhere dreams are followed, and time is a test”

'Perennial Quest' from the Death album Symbolic

Death:
stronger than hope, stronger than love, stronger than life. Chuck
Schuldiner was Death. Death was an anti-band, unable and unwilling to
sustain a stable line-up. Schuldiner enlisted some of the most talented
musicians of his generation and through them he refracted his musical
vision. He was the Miles Davis of metal. But the reaper likewise was
fascinated by him, and Schuldiner succumbed after a two year fight with
brain cancer in December 2001, aged 34.

May 2017 would have seen
Schuldiner turn fifty, but instead it sees Death’s debut album, Scream
Bloody Gore, turn thirty. It is a juvenile work in every sense of the
word. Recorded when Schuldiner was in his late teens with drummer Chris
Reifert, it represents the first step from blood-soaked innocence to
experience, out of which he attained his reputation as The Philosopher
Of Death Metal.

As his career progressed, Schuldiner’s music
became more complex, his lyrics more reflective and nuanced, his
concepts more bold, to the point where he had almost departed the genre
he had helped create by the time of final album The Sound Of
Perseverance (1998). But it was still all shot through with the killer
instinct and sense of violence that suffuses Scream Bloody Gore.

His
mother Jane has said Chuck took the name Death in the wake of his older
brother dying young in an accident. The resulting inchoate rage and a
desire to shock fuels Scream Bloody Gore. Unable to copyright his
original band name (Mantas), Death is as absolute and final a moniker he
could have chosen. It immediately put Schuldiner in contention, and
often conspiracy, with The End itself.

At the beginning of Scream
Bloody Gore, the crashing power chords of ‘Infernal Death’ herald the
gates of Hell yawning open, and Schuldiner’s raw-throated screams and
gnarled vocals bombard us with images of bodily immolation: “Human coals
are burning”. As with much of the album, the song soon speeds up and
the overall impression is of striating flurries and lacerating guitar
lines. ‘Zombie Ritual’ follows and survived in their live set for many
years. With an Egyptian guitar melody that summons images of ancient
evil in the sarcophagi of the moon-dappled pyramids, it shows
Schuldiner’s already burgeoning melodic instincts.

Schuldiner was
not trained in music and could not tell you the Phrygian from the
Ionian mode, but with the deftness of the gifted natural he worked new
and unknowable sounds from his BC Rich Stealth guitar and Marshall
valvestate amp, with just a little chorus effect on the solos (or so he
claimed). Here his lead work is more frenzy than flair but considering
for how long he had been playing the guitar (only a couple of years),
it’s full of rough electricity.

‘Denial Of Life’ shows how this
early incarnation of death metal, and the way its chord progressions
move through the barrage, owed much to Slayer’s Reign In Blood, released
the previous year. It raises questions about what musically
distinguishes proto-death metal and thrash metal, apart from its more
unintelligible vocals (some of the fanzines called the band
“deaththrashers” early on). What is more interesting is how Schuldiner’s
trademarks are developing: particularly how he carves out little
harmonic passages in the slipstream of the overall assault.

It is
with ‘Sacrificial’ that we run into problems. It is hard to re-appraise
Scream Bloody Gore in 2017 and gloss over how problematic the lyrics
are on this album. This song was originally called ‘Sacrificial Cunt’
and though they excised the offending word from the title, its content
is still basic and unsavoury when Schuldiner vows to “ram an axe/ into
your mound” and “shit onto your guts” as “a stupid cunt we sacrifice”.

In
‘Torn To Pieces’ (musically even by these standards outstandingly
savage) this lyrical misogyny surfaces again, depicting an Umberto
Lenzi-inspired Cannibal Ferox scenario meriting “a hook right through
your tits” for a “pathetic rancid cunt”. Though for balance Schuldiner
depicts a similar violation on the male of the species: “Trying to
escape/ They torture you by/ Cutting off your cock”. Equal opportunities
torture maybe, but then he really lets the side down on ‘Mutilation’
with this slice of homophobia: “I celebrate a faggot’s death, human
disgrace”.

Schuldiner spent a lot of his later career distancing
himself from this period of the band on the grounds of being young,
naive, musically unsophisticated. This is often depicted as the “brutal”
era of Death which he later transcended. I would argue that what makes
Death such a compelling project is that the throbbing heart of brutality
remained beating throughout the progress of his music. That makes it
more complicated to uncouple these issues with the first album from his
later efforts.

Should we forgive the teenage Schuldiner this
unnecessary homophobia in light of the fact that he made some of the
most groundbreaking music in Death with two gay musicians, Sean Reinert
and Paul Masvidal, on 1991’s Human? Is it unfair to hone in on these
lyrics on an album that flails wildly in all directions, picking its way
through dismembered limbs, regurgitated guts, lobotomized corpses, and
any available bodily desecration that comes to a teenage male when
constructing their sonic portraits of pain? This is the genre of
Cannibal Corpse is it not, so when Schuldiner shrieks about “Decapitated
head licking your cunt” (on the title track) is it not merely apposite
for the lurid dreams of violence that death metal communicates? Better
out than in, right? For me it is relatively harmless but that doesn’t
make it less objectionable.

The most vulnerable Schuldiner’s
lyrics get is on ‘Evil Dead’: “Trapped Inside a life which is not yours/
Spirits within causing terror, fear and darkness.” It starts with a
sparkling, almost synthesized melody (a processed, tube-filtered sound
he nurtured) that seems to rearrange some of the bare-bones piano motifs
from the soundtrack of the original Evil Dead movie, directed by Sam
Raimi in 1982. It’s useful to compare Death’s shock-and-gore mistakes to
those made by Raimi in his lo-fi cabin-in-the-woods video nasty. The
film garnered most controversy for its “Rape of the Vines” sequence,
where a female protagonist is sexually assaulted by a tree.

In
its aim to shock and transgress, Evil Dead crossed a line which Raimi
later wished it had not. As if to make amends, he remade the film in a
much more focused and violently funny mode in Evil Dead 2, also released
in 1987. Death’s second album, Leprosy (1988), similarly honed its
attack line, and its most famous song ‘Pull The Plug’, sees Schuldiner
take the lyrical perspective of a patient on life support, a position
which is at once more empathetic and darkly humorous than anything on
Scream Bloody Gore. It also saw him tackle his brother’s death head-on
with ‘Open Casket’. Death had started to part ways with morbid fantasy
and that is when the music got much heavier.

Like an element that
needs to form a compound, Schuldiner was drawn to other musicians to
spur him onwards in service to the development of his art. When they
failed to live up to his standards, he could be cruel and damning, such
as in interviews he gave about the lack of professionalism of Rick Rozz,
second guitarist on Leprosy. For Schuldiner, lack of preparedness live
and slow improvements in musical proficiency amounted to an insult. In
reality, there was a callous, Darwinistic streak to Schuldiner – it was
survival of the fittest musicians for the sake of Death’s evolution.

On
Spiritual Healing (1990), Schuldiner plays out an electrifying
duelling-guitarists battle with James Murphy, who had not previously
played in such an extreme band. Murphy’s style is very distinctive,
favouring weird chromatic patterns and sudden, often very graceful leaps
across the fretboard which drove Schuldiner’s squalling soloing style
to adopt its own internal logic and character. The title track is like a
death metal symphony of multiple movements that encompasses
grandstanding theatrics, venomous speed and its repeating “Practise What
You Preach” hardcore groove. Its righteous fury at the religious
neglect of the sick and dying relocates Death’s music to a vivid
“real-life hell”.

The cover art by Ed Repka depicts a bald,
almost ghoulish patient in a wheelchair wearing a hospital gown, more
disturbing now considering Schuldiner’s future terminal illness. He
stares out with vacant, red-rimmed eyes as a cowboy preacher puts his
hand on the patient’s head, with the other extended in a kind of
blessing. The crowd, as Repka’s sketchnotes state, are “forcing sick guy
to submit to preacher’s healing”. In the final version the middle-aged
woman to the preacher’s left and man to the right bear a startling
resemblance to Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.

Sadly,
Schuldiner dropped Repka from future album covers, tending towards
abstract stylisations as his music matured. This development reached its
apogee with 1995’s Symbolic, an album that begins with the lines “I
don’t mean to dwell/ But I can’t help myself”. This reflection situates
it as far away from Scream Bloody Gore’s viscerality as possible: “Do
you remember when/ Things seemed so eternal?”

The opening three
tracks of Symbolic – ‘Symbolic’, ‘Zero Tolerance’ and ‘Empty Words’ –
represent a high water mark in all of metal. A lot of this comes from
Schuldiner’s at-this-point masterly songwriting. The choruses of the
latter two songs particularly reach for loftier heights. But a huge
amount also comes from drummer Gene Hoglan as creative foil. Simply a
revelation of a drummer, from the opening bars of ‘Symbolic’ Hoglan
twists and wraps Schuldiner’s strident opening riff like a snake charmer
manipulating a cobra. His thrashing runs are peppered with astonishing
cymbal work and fills. His double bass drum work during the song’s
chug-out is monstrous. Schuldiner’s instructions to him when he sent the
songs-in-progress was simply to “go sick”.

When it comes to
Hoglan and Schuldiner it is fire meeting fire. They were not without
their history. Death had bitched extensively about Hoglan’s Dark Angel
when they had been treated poorly on a co-headlining tour after the
release of Leprosy. Unlike Schuldiner, who used Death as a vehicle for
his questing, Hoglan was a traveller between bands, his work with Death
only perhaps surpassed on his boundary-breaking albums with the
similarly mercurial Devin Townsend and Strapping Young Lad. Hoglan was a
very big man and used a walking stick because of back problems from
losing some weight around the time of Symbolic. He could also drink
heavily and perform godly miracles behind the kit without remembering a
thing about the gig in the question.

Even now Hoglan is posting
clips of himself playing Death material like ‘The Philosopher’ (from
1993’s Individual Thought Patterns), claiming that he didn’t even
rehearse it before playing it through in one take. Of the numerous
collaborators that became part of Death they all served to define
Schuldiner’s journey deeper into the ‘Crystal Mountain’. They helped him
understand himself and the nature of his being in all its good and bad
aspects.

Death successfully encased and contorted a brutal sound
into new progressive shapes; Schuldiner did not split the two streams.
The most successful and interesting death metal bands today do the same.
It is understandable that Schuldiner recognised Bill Steer of Carcass
as a kindred spirit, fusing melody and aggression, when he praised
Steer’s guitar work on 1993’s Heartwork: “That playing had that magic
rarely heard anymore.” Steer has spoken recently about consciously
“writing for the stage” on Heartwork, which is certainly the mindset
that would have appealed to the Kiss fan and showman in Schuldiner. In
the video tribute his family created for his memorial, there is a
telling transition between home-filmed footage from a Kiss concert and
Death onstage in their prime.

Ultimately, there is death metal,
and then there is Death metal. How much did Death nurture the genre’s
trademark sounds, really?

In fact, Death can sound not much like
classic death metal at all. Like some of the most pioneering bands, they
are an outlier, bursting with creativity, innovation and growth (and
their attendant difficulties under a bloody minded owner-driver). Bands
since have borrowed and stolen small elements of their sound and blown
them up to define a genre.

In this way, Death are beyond their
own boundaries and created their own mini-history of outstanding music.
It was made by a cast of characters that constitute a rock family tree
unto itself, fathered and orchestrated by Schuldiner. Scream Bloody Gore
is the first step on an epic journey and for that reason (though it is
certainly not his best) it is his most important work.

Abolishing the Ignominious (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA) - Vociferous Obsolescence (Coyote Records) An abomination was born by Abolishing the Ignominious all around the f***ing world and spreading a bloody carnage of the most f***ing brutal with a "Vociferous Obsolescence" putting the f***ing Earth to rot! This hungry f***ing beast performs a twisted Brutal Death F***ing Metal destroying everything in its f***ing path in a f***ed up f***ing way and with this first massacre, Its managing very well to mark the f***ing minds of scared people! This "Vociferous Obsolescence" is divided in six killer f***ing acts being all f***ing excellent and having all of them a few boring parts but surrounded by great moments making flows this f***ing shit still very well! Because of the very high twisted touch, its not really the kind of release being very addictive maybe by lacking on the catchy riffing side but mostly because this f***ing shit is completely f***ed up on all f***…

Kieran James (Busuk Chronicles): Hi,
can you tell me the early history from the formation of the band up to now? Arelys
Jimenez (female vocalist): Greetings! I have been trying to form my own black
metal band for many years now. Finally got it to happen! It started by the end
of 2014, with a complete different line-up which I was contacted from a post I
had on craigslist looking for members and we were called Enochian Ritual. I
felt the band was not progressing as I wanted to be. I told them it is best to
depart ways as I pursue what I am looking for in creating this band. I went
through a few line-up changes from members moving out of state, wanting to
focus on their own project, or simply work-related interference. Now we are
back with a full line up and new band name “Matianak” (which is an Indonesian
folklore witch that died from stillbirth.) The band now consists of 2 guitarists,
bass player, drummer, and me on vocals and I hope that there are no changes
again so that I can contin…

My interview with Dajjal (Bandung death-metal)Interpretation by: Popo (Vocalist Demons Damn)Expert Comments & Questions by: Popo and Bobby
Rock (Vocalist Hydro) Dajjal is: Barok (Vocals); Zulf (Guitar); Karkash
(Guitar); and Runal (Drums); no bass player at present. Note that Karkash has
since left the band.Date: 22 January 2014 @ Dada’s Deathstar Tattoo, BandungJack
Frost: It is great that we can finally interview your band because Dajjal is a
legendary band in Bandung although now with Karkash, the young-blood guitarist.
It is good I got to know Karkash through the Facebook so now we can have this
interview. Please tell us the history of the band. Runal
(Drummer): We were formed in October 1995. The original member until now is
only Barock. JF:
The oldest? Karkash:
One of the oldest! JF:
How many albums for your band? Zulf
(Guitarist): Two. JF:
What are the album titles? Karkash:
The first album Amarah, meaning
“anger”, was released in 2000 and the second album called Human Dark Side i…

Kieran James: Hi, can you tell me the early history from the formation of the band up to now? VALAFAR band: We formed early 2013 in Bradford, West Yorkshire. Most of the band knew each
other from previous groups around the Bradford circuit and joined to create Valafar.
Our first Demo EP 'Ritual of the Diabolical' was released in February 2013. Following
this, 'Helheim', the first full length album was independently released in August 2015.
Since then we have been performing regularly nationwide at clubs, bars and
festivals. KJ2: How is the response of people to your debut full-length album Helheim? We’ve had a great response so far from our fans. The first pressings of the CD sold
out completely and the reviews have been extremely positive. We’re still frequently
selling copies online and at gigs over a year after the initial release. KJ3: What are the most influential bands for you guys in playing music? As a band we take our influences from Scandinavian bands such as…

Kieran James1: Please tell us the band history and the line-upchanges up until today. Shasank Venkat (lead guitarist)1.) It all started back in 2009 when Siri (vocals / bass), Sravan (vocals / rhythm guitar) and myself Shasank (lead guitar) got together and formed a hard rock / metal cover band called Echo. We played a lot of gigs around the country but we never got a chance to write and play our own music since it was a cover band. In 2014, we decided to form another band dedicated to playing our own music. Noble John (Drums) joined us as the drummer and that's how Against Evil happened.

2 How has response been to the Against Evil EP? What countries or regions have you had the most impact?2.) The response to our debut EP "Fatal Assault" has been amazing! Most of the critical acclaim came from parts of Europe and India.

3 What are the band influences? The song I prefer is
Speedbreaker and I hear the strong Judas Priest and Accept influence, is
that correct?3.) You are ri…